Trickster

Trickster: 

to write of rabbits again, thinking of when they first caught my imagination as a child and seeing them near my grandmother's garden, being the bane of her vegetables and flowers, no fence or wire to keep them out for long. I would set cardboard box traps for them, using a bit of lettuce to lure them beneath the box and trigger the cure to release the stick that held the box in place, effectively catching the rabbit and allowing me to transfer it someplace safe, garden free and in the wild. Except, of course, it never worked, not a single rabbit ever caught. Here was my earliest experience with a trickster spirit, mischievous, laughing at the human folly of battling nature of any kind. 

from that point rabbits always played in my imagination, storybooks with their mythological adventures shown would pull me into their magical world. Gardens were more than vegetables patches it seemed, they portals into the very heart and belief in myth. Even as I grew older, from childhood to teens and then my earliest adult years, they would continue with their trickster role, appearing just as my belief in a magical world was fading to the responsibility of adulthood. 

rabbits kept me grounded in the belief of magic and myth.

a trickster role throughout my life.

for this...I'm truly grateful. 

somewhere in my teens I watched the movie Harvey, late at night, most likely home from a search of party or other means of spending the infinite energy of those years. No matter what I did, how many parties, alcohol or drugs, there was an impossible void to fill, the loneliness of youth already in slight shift towards an undertone of depression that would last through much of my life. Again, the trickster, a six foot tall rabbit appear only to Jimmy Stewart's character in his own time of despair. Harvey was a pooka, a mischievous character from Celtic lore, and through the screen from my small television, late at night and volume low - magic reappeared. 

what Harvey did was simply reawaken my curiosity to the mystery of world, of wild places that hold a thin line between ordinary reality and myth. And that's true magic, life itself, and how everything appears from absolutely nowhere to the exactness of the present moment, continuously, seamlessly, without effort from my end for any of this to occur.

life just appears. 

and there's nothing more magical. 

that's the role of a trickster, causing a shift in the view of life, reawakening a sense of magic and connection to the mystery and wildness of the world. I see rabbits almost daily now, more so than ever before, and they always draw me to that thin line connecting me to magic. They are a life theme for me, trickster companions that keep me fully anchored in this mystery. 

~

Peace, Eric